Description
The Coast by John Enright
ISBN (print): 978-1-936364-42-8
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-936364-43-5
Price: $16.00 (Trade paperback)
Fiction
209 pages
Some relationships linger across decades and continents, no matter how much individuals change. The links between Patrick, Joanna, Daisy, and San Francisco, though stretched, never snap. San Francisco and the Bay Area are at the heart of this story about a young man’s passage, about three lives evolving over forty years. When Patrick discovers San Francisco in the summer before the Summer of Love, he is old enough to be drafted for Vietnam, but too young to buy beer. His innocence extends from women to psychedelics. The City will tutor him. Joanna is a Bolinas poet; Daisy her ten-year old daughter. In a world of lost families, they invent a simulacrum.
The city is not just streets and seascapes, but events and the people drawn to and shaped by the place. It is North Beach and the Mothers of Invention, City Lights Bookstore and LSD, Hammett’s after-midnight fog and the Golden Gate. Patrick leaves and returns, leaves and returns to his default base. And Joanna and Daisy—now Meredith, a Mills College student in the ‘70s, then a successful editor by the ‘00s—are there to reconnect. Their histories are entwined with the history of the place. Those were perilous and shifting times, and they rode their lifeboat through the heart of it. A one-off, shotgun history of a generation.
Reviews
“In The Coast, Enright depicts a San Francisco that has truly disappeared from this earth to be replaced by a simulacrum where ghosts walk through virtual realities. Yet it holds out the promise of a city again poised to rise from ashes, one where real people live, love, die, and, perhaps, are resurrected.””
— Michael Joyce, author of Remedia: a Picaresque
“Enright’s style is so delightfully casual and conversational that you might miss [his] perceptive and penetrating comments about American life…. Enright tackles serious issues, but he’s a deft yarn-spinner and will seduce you at once.”
— The Providence Journal
“This was a beautiful read and I so enjoyed it because it was just so unexpected and unusual. Enright has an incredible way of writing that just takes you along for the ride. If you’re the sort of person that loves people watching and watching life happen in front of you, then you will love this story. Take it as it comes and move along with it. Highly recommend!”
— Katy’s Book Den review on Goodreads
“Through its portraits of natives and outsiders drawn to San Francisco for disparate (yet sometimes similar) reasons, the ultimate power of The Coast lies in its ability to realistically and grippingly portray and contrast the environment and culture of the times through the coming-of-age of four individuals who find themselves caught up in and transformed by them.
Think Jack Kerouac’s classic On the Road, but with a wider-ranging journey and a more contemporary band of adventurers who reside in an era where everything feels possible and nothing is set in stone. Of special note is the clash between dreams and ideals, and the realities, and the realities that settle in as opportunity shifts to become adversity.
The result is a vivid account of individual lives changed by choice and circumstance which vibrates with the Summer of Love and moves forward into its aftermath and its ultimate impact on the adventurers.
Libraries and readers seeking San Francisco-centric novels steeped in Bay Area culture, neighborhoods, and norms will find The Coast compelling and thoroughly engrossing.”
— D. Donovan, Midwest Book Review, April 11, 2024
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